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The New York Fed engages with individuals, households and businesses in the Second District and maintains an active dialogue in the region. The Bank gathers and shares regional economic intelligence to inform our community and policy makers, and promotes sound financial and economic decisions through community development and education programs.

February 28, 2014

Would it ever occur to anyone that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl, 1964) teaches economic lessons about “incentives, poverty, scarcity, producers, consumers, and competition”? Or that The Lorax (Dr. Seuss, 1971) covers “natural resources, choices, and scarcity”? Or that Curious George Goes to a Chocolate Factory (Margret and H. A. Rey, 1998) is an examination of “producers, capital resources, and goods”?

February 26, 2014

In a previous Liberty Street Economicspost, we introduced a framework for thinking about the risks banks face. In particular, we distinguished between asset return risk and funding risk that can interact and cause a bank to fail. In our framework, a bank can fail for two reasons:

February 24, 2014

One of the major roles of banks and other financial intermediaries is to channel funds from savings into valuable projects. In doing so, banks engage in “liquidity and maturity transformation,” since they finance long-term, illiquid projects while funding themselves with short-term, liquid liabilities. By performing this important role, banks expose themselves to the risk of runs: If depositors or other short-term creditors worry about their claims, they may withdraw funds en masse and cause the bank to fail. The recent financial crisis once again highlighted the fragility associated with financial intermediaries performing the roles of maturity and liquidity transformation. This post draws upon our paper “Stability of Funding Models: An Analytical Framework” to illustrate the determinants of a financial intermediary’s ability to survive stress events.

February 21, 2014

In a prior blog post, we saw how Maiden Lane evolved over time. It was here that a momentous event occurred in
1790, changing the history of the United States.

While serving as Secretary of State in 1790, Thomas
Jefferson rented a “mean house” at 57 Maiden Lane "for
106 pounds per year" and “not approving much of the stiff style and
etiquette of New York he gave up all his time to the establishment of his new
department, foreign affairs, and home." There was much to occupy
Jefferson’s time while he was in residence here—in particular, the debt crisis
of 1790.

February 20, 2014

The European Central Bank (ECB) released its 2014:Q1 Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) on February 13. The release comes at a time of growing concern about low Euro-zone inflation: consumer prices were up only 0.7 percent over the year in January, the fourth consecutive monthly reading of less than 1 percent and well below the ECB’s target of just below 2 percent. Some commentators have argued that falling inflation after five years of recession or very slow growth has raised the threat of deflation.

February 19, 2014

Fluctuations in unemployment are mostly driven by fluctuations in the job-finding prospects of unemployed workers—except at the onset of recessions, according to various research papers (see, for example, Shimer [2005, 2012] and Elsby, Hobijn, and Sahin [2010]). With job losses back to their pre-recession levels, the job-finding rate is arguably one of the most important indicators to watch. This rate—defined as the fraction of unemployed workers in a given month who find jobs in the consecutive month—provides a good measure of how easy it is to find jobs in the economy. The chart below presents the job-finding rate starting from 1990. Clearly, the job-finding rate is still substantially below its pre-recession levels, suggesting that it is still difficult for the unemployed to find work. In this post, we explore the underlying reasons behind the low job-finding rate.

According to today’s release of the New York Fed’s 2013:Q4 Household Debt and Credit Report, aggregate consumer debt increased by $241 billion in the fourth quarter, the largest quarter-to-quarter increase since 2007. More importantly, between 2012:Q4 and 2013:Q4, total household debt rose $180 billion, marking the first four-quarter increase in outstanding debt since 2008. As net household borrowing resumes, it is interesting to see who is driving these balance changes, and to compare some of today’s patterns with those of the boom period.

February 14, 2014

Puerto Rico’s economy has been in a protracted economic slump since 2006. If there were officially designated recessions for the Commonwealth, it probably would have been in one for the better part of these past seven years. Real GNP had fallen 12 percent before finally leveling off in 2012. But the economic measure most widely relied upon to gauge the island’s economy—because the data are monthly and timely—is payroll employment. Between early 2006 and the first half of 2011, this measure fell by a similar amount (13 percent); it then started to recover gradually in late 2011 and into the first part of 2012. But late in the year it began to nosedive again, reaching new lows in mid-2013—Or did it? More complete tabulations of employment presage upward revisions to Puerto Rico’s payroll job count, suggesting that current employment (and thus economic) conditions are not as gloomy as they appear, based on currently reported data.

February 12, 2014

How tight is the labor market? The unemployment rate is down substantially from its October 2009 peak, but two-thirds of the decline is due to people dropping out of the labor force. In addition, an unusually large share of the unemployed has been out of work for twenty-seven weeks or more—the long-duration unemployed. These statistics suggest that there remains a great deal of slack in U.S. labor markets, which should be putting downward pressure on labor compensation. Instead, compensation growth has moved modestly higher since 2009. A potential explanation is that the long-duration unemployed exert less influence on wages than the short-duration unemployed, a hypothesis we examine here. While preliminary, our findings provide some support for this hypothesis and show that models taking into account unemployment duration produce more accurate forecasts of compensation growth.

Liberty Street Economics features insight and analysis from New York Fed economists working at the intersection of research and policy. Launched in 2011, the blog takes its name from the Bank’s headquarters at 33 Liberty Street in Manhattan’s Financial District.

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